Using vibration on the wrists to enhance cochlear implant listening

Cochlear implants (CIs) allow many users to achieve excellent speech understanding in quiet listening conditions. However, most struggle to understand speech when there is background noise and to locate sounds. Recently, we have shown large improvements in speech-in-noise performance and sound localisation when supplementing the electrical CI signal with haptic stimulation on the wrists (“electro-haptic stimulation”). This talk will present these findings and discuss the future directions for this work, including the development of a new wearable haptic device